As the pace of technological change accelerates, traditional job roles are evolving into more dynamic, skills-based ones. For employers, mapping skills and investing in upskilling and reskilling staff have become essential strategies for long-term success. For employees, this transformation means that they are now expected to adapt to shifting needs and are no longer seen as fixed-role holders.
“Skills were viewed as stable. Companies would store job descriptions for job postings, and these would be used for hiring a new person if the original person left,” reflects Nicholas Jones, Head of Customer Success and Support at DevSkiller, a platform for skills assessment, mapping, and management. “Roles are now more dynamic, allowing employees to transition laterally more frequently and with greater ease.”
In this conversation with TechTalents Insights, Jones reflects on how companies can build talent strategies to thrive in a skills-first world — from creating a process that helps identify and evaluate soft skills, to integrating freelancers into skills management frameworks.
TechTalents Insights: How has the concept of skills management evolved in the past few years, particularly in the IT sector? What are the key drivers of this change?
Nicholas Jones: Skills were viewed as stable. You have a backend developer who works with Java, or a frontend developer who works primarily with React. Through some allocation of L&D budget, they would complete some training in technologies directly connected with their job role. Companies would store job descriptions for job postings, and these or original interview answers would be used for hiring a new person if the original person left.
Due to the increasing role of automation, the use of cloud, and now AI, there are many more hybrid roles. MLOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineers, Cloud Native engineers, and many more. Determining who fits these roles best tends to be driven by specific skillsets that individuals have developed over varied careers. As the IT industry continues to become more competitive, workplace agility has become more important. To address this need, skill management has evolved to focus on tracking employees’ skills, identifying overlaps, and selecting the best, or closest, match for a role.
Companies often start by tracking skills in spreadsheets, but these spreadsheets quickly become unmanageable due to growing teams and the evolution of roles. This drives the adoption of specialized tools designed to streamline skills management.
Roles are now more dynamic, allowing employees to transition laterally more frequently and with greater ease.
TechTalents Insights: What are the most effective strategies for evaluating the skills of both employees and candidates?
Nicholas Jones: Evaluating employees and evaluating candidates are somewhat different scenarios. When evaluating candidates, you’re optimizing for the highest signal in an uncertain environment with an emphasis on minimizing false positives. A false positive when recruiting a candidate is very costly to a company, so reducing the rate is very important. For developer candidates, some kind of development task that asks them to fix a buggy application, or maybe add some additional features to a working application. Then you can evaluate how they performed on the task and discuss their implementation with them in a technical interview.
For evaluating employees skills, minimizing false negatives is more important than minimizing false positives. This is primarily due to the fact that you have many more indicators to go on when considering an internal employee. For example, you know their work ethic, their culture fit, whether the work they produce is adequate. With internal employees, you are also paying for any costs associated with their time if you send them assessments. For internal employees, peer feedback, manager feedback, and self-assessment can provide a full picture of their skills, with a reduced risk of false negatives.
TechTalents Insights: Companies are increasingly hiring IT freelancers to fill niche skill gaps. What strategies can organizations adopt to integrate freelance work into their skills management?
Nicholas Jones: Our opinion at DevSkiller is that your skills management tool should be able to handle freelancers as regular employees. You should keep profiles of freelancers’ skills within your tool, along with their past projects and performance. Track whether they’re benched or currently working with your teams. A great way to do this is to have a separate team consisting of freelancers, then you can easily separate their data from other teams.
TechTalents Insights: Soft skills are crucial for adaptability. What strategies can organizations adopt to develop soft skills alongside technical expertise, in order to build more resilient and agile teams?
Nicholas Jones: Tracking the soft skills of employees is a starting point. Companies run retrospectives on projects after they finish, but these are usually focused on timelines and bugs. Create a process for reviewing communication breakdowns, misaligned expectations, conflict resolution moments, etc., during projects to make reflection on soft skill performance routine. Push engineers to sit in on customer calls to promote empathy and perspective-taking. You can also tie soft skills development to career advancement. Most soft skills will be learned by working with people who have strong soft skills, so pairing the team members who lack in this area with those who are strong can promote an increase in soft skills.
TechTalents Insights: How can leaders future-proof their workforce ahead of rapid technological change?
Nicholas Jones: Optimize teams for fast, low-cost skill acquisition by developing small cross-functional teams. Create a culture where internal mobility is encouraged. Find individuals who bridge domains, for instance frontend developers who have overlap with design, or data engineers who are skilled with product development. If you start with mapping your organization’s skills, these individuals will be easier to find. Create a culture where learning is visible and rewarded. Highlight people who retrain.
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